Empire1650 BCE – 1200 BCE · 450 years
Hittite Empire
The Bronze Age power that stalemated Egypt and pioneered iron-working.
What it was
From their capital at Hattusa in central Anatolia, the Hittites ruled most of modern Turkey and northern Syria from roughly 1600 to 1180 BCE. The 1259 BCE treaty between Hittite king Hattusili III and Pharaoh Ramesses II is the oldest surviving peace treaty.
Why it mattered
The Hittite collapse was a key event in the Bronze Age Collapse — the simultaneous fall of nearly every major eastern Mediterranean civilization around 1177 BCE.
From Wikipedia
The Hittites were an Anatolian Indo-European people who formed one of the first major civilizations of the Bronze Age in West Asia. Possibly originating from beyond the Black Sea, they settled in north-central Anatolia in the early 2nd millennium BC. There they formed a series of polities, including the kingdom of Kussara, the Kanesh or Nesha Kingdom, and an empire centered on their capital, Hattusa. Known in modern times as the Hittite Empire, it reached its peak during the mid-14th century BC under Šuppiluliuma I, when it encompassed most of Anatolia and parts of northern Syria and Upper Mesopotamia, bordering the rival empires of the Hurri-Mitanni and Assyrians.
Wikipedia: Hittites·CC BY-SA 4.0
Borders & accuracy
Solid borders are reconstructed from canonical historical-basemap data or hand-crafted from scholarly atlases.
- SOURCEaourednik / historical-basemaps
- DETAILkept-original
- SNAPSHOT1500 BCE
- MATCHEDHittites
- POLITY TYPEstate
Wars of this empire14
Conflicts whose belligerents name this polity, best-documented first.
- Battle of Kadesh1274 BCEWorld-changing · 10K dead
- Sea Peoples Invasions1200–1150 BCEWorld-changing
- Suppiluluma I's Mitanni Wars1344–1320 BCEMajor conflict
- Suppiluluma I's Carchemish Conquest1330–1325 BCEMajor conflict
- Hittite Kussara Campaigns1680–1650 BCESignificant
- Hittite Alalakh Campaigns1600–1580 BCESignificant
- Hittite Aleppo Campaign1595–1585 BCESignificant
- Thutmose III's Northern Campaigns (Campaigns 10-13)1468–1465 BCESignificant
- Tushratta's Mitanni Campaigns1380–1360 BCESignificant
- Hittite-Amarna Correspondence Period1380–1350 BCESignificant
- Suppiluluma I's Aleppo Conquest1340–1335 BCESignificant
- Muwatalli II's Levantine Campaigns1295–1275 BCESignificant
- Ramesses II's Amurru Conquest1278–1273 BCESignificant
- Hattusili III's Carchemish Conflicts1265–1250 BCERegional
Open in the atlas →Seeks the timeline to 1650 BCE and fits the map to these borders.
Cite as: Hittite Empire (1650 BCE – 1200 BCE). War Atlas. https://waratlas.org/e/hittite-empire · Sources & methodology